Garden Of Blog

Life is weird, isn’t it? It just keeps going (if you’re lucky). As you get older, it gets more and more like Groundhog Day. Did you see that movie? Guy gets up every morning and it’s the same day.

When you’re young, this idea seems most ludicrous I think. Something new and exciting seems to happen every day when you’re young. But the older you get, the more you’ve seen, and the larger your sample of past days becomes. Daily. And the curve flattens out as you realize that, more or less, every day IS much like the last, and you well know that even spikes on that chart (9/11, etc.) will be balanced out by another several hundred really boring-ass days.

Not that I’m bored with life. Not at all. Don’t ask me why, because it seems I ought to be.

Thanks to Ed for pointing out that comments were broken after the server move I just did.

Should be fixed now!

Some of my recent posts have been deliberately provocative, being that I question the relationship between language and bigotry. As a young literary idealist I always viewed words as colors on a palette, all available to the artist, and each of us an artist at life. I still view it that way. I will tolerate “bad” words in a wide variety of contexts.

It’s ok to paint an ugly picture, with paints or words. It’s expression, and it’s protected. It’s ok to call a guy a wetback, even if his family has been in this country for generations. The funny thing about the article I just linked to is, the guy acts like the “w” word is so audacious and forbidden, he refers to it only as the “w” word the first few times, until he is forced to explain himself. Before I clicked through and saw the photograph of the apparently hispanic author, I thought the “w” word might be “white”. I just really couldn’t think of a “w” word that referred to race besides “white” when reading only the headline.

Today for lunch, at the brick oven buffet in Holloway, they had a sauceless variety of pizza they called “Ken’s White Pizza” or something like that. It was at least “white”. So I started going off about how I was offended by their terming the pizza “white” because, what does pizza have to do with my ethnicity? Does my race really need to come into this? Is “white” pizza any less valid than any other pizza?

The black girl nearby actually laughed, to my relief, since I hadn’t noticed her until she burst out. Do I usually censor myself in such situations? Yeah. But people are missing out on some great lines here.

As I was telling Tim, or someone else maybe too, I think white guilt is dead, and us liberals have crossed over into fullscale oppression envy. I’m just a white guy with a bunch of other white guys who are supposed to hang around feeling guilty together. I’d rather be a brother. You know? I mean, these guys call each other brother. How cool is that? They’ve got a club. And they won’t have me as a member. Woody Allen was right: that’s a club I’d really like to be in.

Everyone loves an underdog. All the good movies feature underdogs prevailing. Being white sucks because there’s no claim to underdog status. Succeeding, for a white guy, is just inheriting a stolen past. Black guys get to overcome the odds. Now that’s a hero story.

Who’s MY nigger??

Reading some of my previous posts, I come to realize what an obnoxious person I really am. Apologies to those obliged to deal with me.

Geek posts serve us better. If you’re looking for a free email/calendaring solution with portable data and good client software, try Mozilla’s Thunderbird in combination with the Lightning and Google Provider plugins. Your Google Calendar data, from one or multiple calendars, is now integrated with your email in T-Bird. I think Google is going to win with this approach, making the data you share with Google open and free to toss around in other applications. You can still use the Google Calendar web interface, of course, which is what Jessica is still doing on the calendar that we keep for the family.

What’s nice about Lightning is, you could also add calendars from other data sources, or a local data source, and mashup your entire temporal reality. Or something like that.

Here are some great Kurt Vonnegut tales from his old writing student, John Irving.

Endearing stories. I thought I could not have liked Vonnegut more, but now I do. He was the man, is the man, always will be the man. Wish I knew him.

Carnegie Mellon University has figured out how to attract more women to its Computer Science department: by “moving emphasis away from programming proficiency”. That brought them from 8% female enrollment in CS to 40%. Bravo.

Because, you know, a degree in computer science doesn’t have to be weighed down by all that exposure to code.

In fact, studies show, remove the code from a computer, and it will cease crashing and exhibit no bugs whatsoever. It will also do absolutely nothing.

Top-shelf schools of medicine will soon follow suit in order to attract more prospective women doctors by shifting emphasis away from the study of anatomy, which is seen as complex and boring.
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Seriously, it’s OKAY for men and women to be interested in different things, in differing percentages. Enrollment speaks to interest, not aptitude. Did they think of coloring computers pink, or making them wear corsets? All we need is better marketing, not an easier course of study. Computers right now are marketed as tools for GETTING THINGS DONE, clearly a male endeavour. If they focused instead on computers as tools for MAKING MEN GET THINGS DONE, I am sure more women would become interested in majoring in CS.

C’mon, let’s give it a try.

Actually, I was thinking of entering a Women’s Studies program but gee, it just doesn’t interest me that much. Could you change the program? Maybe remove some of the emphasis on women, who I consider complex and boring?

Just kidding, ladies. All I’m trying to do is get a reaction. Imus makes one little comment about nappy-headed ho’s and it’s worldwide news. I can’t get arrested. ISN’T ANYONE INTERESTED IN MY TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE COMMENTS? AM I NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH???

So it looks like they fired that honkey Don Imus.

I don’t know. I don’t get it. Since age ten, there hasn’t been a single name you could call me that would get me very upset. Because around ten I came to understand the phrase “sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me”. People are mean sometimes and they call other people names. So what? Getting all bent out of shape seems pretty thin-skinned to me, no matter what color you are. Crying to the teacher over name calling?

Personally I think all us nappy-headed ho’s, honkeys, spics, injuns, and chinks ought to grow up, and lighten up. Sure, there is injustice in the world. And people stereotype each other all the time, making cruel innuendo. So why do we amplify their words by protesting so much? I wasn’t listening to Imus that day, and would have never been exposed to his rant if it weren’t for the big reaction. Let it go, folks. There are far bigger fish to fry (like G.W. Asshole send-the-kids-to-war Bush) than Don Imus, who isn’t even a racist, just a guy with a big mouth, like me.